How to Add Simple PayPal Buy Now Buttons to WordPress

When you want to sell a product or two, you don’t need any complicated ecommerce solutions. The problem with ecommerce solutions is that many of them are advanced and mostly targeted towards tech savvy users. A simple solution to sell a product or service on your WordPress based site is to add a PayPal “Buy Now” button and start accepting payments, instantly. With PayPal, you don’t need to worry about configuring any payment gateway solutions, or pay any hefty fees upfront. You can start accepting credit cards, debit cards, and PayPal payments in no time. In this tutorial, you will learn how to add PayPal button to WordPress, in the most simple way ever. The best part is that you don’t need to be tech savvy or a programmer to follow these steps.

To get started, you’ll need a PayPal account. If you don’t have one, then you can create one for free. When creating a new PayPal account, you have the option to choose from three different account types: Personal, Premier and Business.

Personal accounts, as the name suggests, should be used to make purchases and send money to family and friends.

Premier accounts should be used if you don’t have a full time business, but want to accept PayPal when you sell online. With Premier accounts, you can accept debit or credit cards and payments from PayPal.

Business accounts should be used if you are a business who operate under a company or group name.

With these things cleared, we can now move to the next step.

Creating PayPal Button

Sign-in your PayPal account and then head over to this page and click on “Create your button now”. You will be then headed to a page where you need to fill out some fields and options to get your PayPal button code.

Step 1: Choose a button type and enter your payment details:
The first option that you’ll be presented with is to choose a button type. If you are confused, then you can click on the “Which button should I choose” link to know more about each buttons. For this tutorial’s sake, I chose the “Buy Now” button from the drop down box.

Next, enter item name and item ID. The name that you enter here will be displayed in the payment screen when your customer clicks on your button.

In the item ID, enter a unique identifier number that makes tracking easy. For example, if this is your first item, then enter 1.

Enter a price of the product/service and select the currency in which you want to accept payment.

In the customize button section, you can add drop-down menu with different price per options and you can add text fields. Also you have the option to show/hide credit card logos, use a smaller PayPal button or use your own custom button, instead of the PayPal’s.

Next, enter your shipping and tax related information. Enter “Postage” amount and then enter “Tax” amount in percentage. If you are not aware of postage and tax details, then you can call your local authorities and ask them about this. You can also leave both the fields as blank if you don’t want to apply any postage and tax on your item.

You have the option to select between using your merchant account ID or using your primary email address. If you select merchant account ID, then PayPal links your merchant account ID to your primary email address so it isn’t visible to spammers and if you select email address option, then your email address will be displayed on the payment screen making it visible to spammers. With this step being complete, you can get the button code, but let’s complete step 2 and step 3 also.

Step 2: Track inventory, profit and loss (optional)

The default option to save button at PayPal will be checked. Leave it as it is.

If you want to track inventory, then check mark this option so that you don’t oversell items that are not in stock. You will get an email alert whenever your item is low in stock. Enter item ID, total quantity in stock and alert quantity. You can also choose an option if you want to let customers buy an item which is sold out, or stop customers from buying that item.

Step 3: Customise advanced features (optional)

In this step, we’re dealing with advanced options.

You have the option to let your customer change order quantities in the checkout page. You can also allow your customers to send special instructions in a message to you, and select if you require your customer’s postal address.

Now, coming to the next advanced part of checkout process. You can create a custom success page which will be displayed when your customers successfully finish checkout process. Create such a page in your WordPress site by going to Pages > Add New. In this success page, you can add a thank you note, give an estimated shipping timeline and add any other important note which you wish to give to your customer.

You can also create a cancel page which will be displayed when the customer cancels their checkout process, just in case they change their mind. You can add some points that will entice them to continue with the buying of the product. This page gives you a second chance to grab customer.

Once you are done creating both of the pages, enter their full URL in the respective field and hit “Create button”.

Place PayPal Button on your Site

You will now get the button code. A preview of the button is also displayed in the right hand side.

Select the code, copy it and open your WordPress site where you want to place this PayPal Buy Now button.

Open the post or page where you want to place this button. Click on the Text tab (HTML tab in WordPress v. 3.4 and below) and then paste the code. Click on the Update or Publish button.

That’s all you need to do. Now, whenever someone clicks on this button, they will be taken to PayPal’s secured checkout screen where they can pay for the item.

You can create more buttons and place it on your site and let the revenue come. PayPal will keep a track of each of your sales.

There are also some WordPress plugins that you can use for this purpose, but when this process is so easy, why add one more active plugin to the site.